I may have recovered from Penguin!

17 replies
  • SEO
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Ok heres the thing , my site was smashed in the last Penguin update and dissapereard from the SERPS completely .

Luckily I had only a couple of thousand links to my product pages (blog /forums/article directories etc) - all have now been removed using a good freelancer on Elance (costUS$100) . A week ago i noticed a complete reversal in my rankings to almost where they were .I

n addition i added a Blog section with 20 unique articles on 20 seperate pages (all with zero links in ) .These pages are now ranking in the top 10 for my main KW's.

I did no onsite work at all (that is no removal of internal links/url changes or diluting KW copy as suggested in this forum)

If this holds i can only conclude that Google is now ranking for NO LINKS in but for content alone .As crazy as it sounds

If this is the case my feeling is stop building links (quality or not) as Google sees any SEO link building as manipualtion.

The only links into my site are from DMOZ and Yahoo thats it ,nothing else

Thought i would share -Any thoughts?
#penguin #recovered
  • Profile picture of the author wilsonm
    Originally Posted by brainsmart View Post

    If this holds i can only conclude that Google is now ranking for NO LINKS in but for content alone .As crazy as it sounds

    If this is the case my feeling is stop building links (quality or not) as Google sees any SEO link building as manipualtion.

    The only links into my site are from DMOZ and Yahoo thats it ,nothing else
    Ranking on content alone? Don't think so somehow. DMOZ and Yahoo links has made your site the most fittest in that niche of yours.
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  • Profile picture of the author Blaine Smitley
    Your yahoo listing.. Did you pay for that? Just curious.
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  • Profile picture of the author cooler1
    How frequently does Google run the penguin filter? I thought the first penguin refresh was 25th may, yet you say your rankings returned 20th may.

    I've checked various competitor sites which are ranking in the top #3 and a lot of them have zero backlinks according to backlink checkers. It seems that Penguin penalizes sites based on the linking profile, it doesn't just devalue links like certain SEO'ers are saying. Have you checked the linking profile of your competitors sites on page 1?
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  • Profile picture of the author Certitude
    Are you saying that you removed every single link to your site or just the links that you had created? How do you know there are no remaining links apart from DMOZ and Yahoo?

    How competitive is your main keyword?
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    “We Dream And We Build. We Never Give Up, We Never Quit.” ~ Jeremy Renner as Carmine Polito in American Hustle
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    I've been ranking a large list of keywords, with nothing except internal links & some clever on-page SEO. Most of these new keywords are 1-3 words long.

    I'm ranking new keywords based on the fact that Google can't possibly crawl my entire 1k page site in a single crawl.

    I do have a lot of external links built by my traffic over the years, but I think I could replicate this on another domain as long as I have these 3 things:
    • Hundreds of relevant indexed pages
    • At least a single internal page that gets crawled by Google bots daily
    • Access to the entire sites source code

    So basically the only thing I need as far as off-page SEO is a single web page with some quality external links pointing at the one page.

    Rank the single root keyword/page with quality external links & you can continually rank relevant keywords in the SERPs, without any further off-page SEO.

    You don't even have to keep building external links to the page already ranked by external links, you just need a steady flow of Google bots visiting that one ranked page.

    Granted, I doubt I would rank for the keyword car insurance with only on-page SEO, but I'm very sure I could rank first page for a lot of mid level competition keywords that still generate decent traffic (with the 3 items listed above).
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  • Profile picture of the author zecke
    Yukon - "some clever on-page SEO" ? We know about silos but what else is "clever on-page" ?
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    • Profile picture of the author yukon
      Banned
      Originally Posted by zecke View Post

      Yukon - "some clever on-page SEO" ? We know about silos but what else is "clever on-page" ?

      This here:
      I'm ranking new keywords based on the fact that Google can't possibly crawl my entire 1k page site in a single crawl.
      I'm not posting exact details on a public forum, but I'll give a hint.

      Google bots can't crawl large sites in a single visit, they only crawl small chunks of internal URLs at a time (per visit). I don't think this will change in the next few years because it would kill Googles server farms & bandwidth. Even with Googles deep pockets & todays technology Google would go broke, they couldn't afford to crawl every single site/page in a single visit.

      Since Google can't crawl the entire site, you can rotate a list of keywords.

      Seriously, this is one of the biggest things to ever hit SEO, I'm not selling anything & I'm not BSing, this technique has helped me rank pages a lot easier. I've only had 1 keyword out of about 50 new keywords that didn't get one of my pages on the first page of Google SERPs.

      BTW, this has nothing to do with Silos, Silos are good, this is something totally different.
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      • Profile picture of the author ochaim
        Originally Posted by yukon View Post

        This here:

        Since Google can't crawl the entire site, you can rotate a list of keywords.

        Seriously, this is one of the biggest things to ever hit SEO, I'm not selling anything & I'm not BSing, this technique has helped me rank pages a lot easier. I've only had 1 keyword out of about 50 new keywords that didn't get one of my pages on the first page of Google SERPs.
        so you're saying, find a page that gets crawled relatively frequently and rotate the keywords there? so I'm guessing that page has something that is updated relatively frequently.

        (I'd pm you but my posts aren't quite up there yet)
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        • Profile picture of the author zecke
          Yukon - "I'm not posting exact details on a public forum, but I'll give a hint."

          So why don`t You sell Your knowledge with WSO ? I`ll be first to buy this kind of stuff

          Please tell us more hints about rotating keywords, maybe examples

          Your silo theory is great but only few people following this method because it`s not easy it`s not xrummer blast - it requires thinking and strategy. Give us more
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          • Profile picture of the author yukon
            Banned
            Originally Posted by zecke View Post

            Yukon - "I'm not posting exact details on a public forum, but I'll give a hint."

            So why don`t You sell Your knowledge with WSO ? I`ll be first to buy this kind of stuff

            Please tell us more hints about rotating keywords, maybe examples

            Your silo theory is great but only few people following this method because it`s not easy it`s not xrummer blast - it requires thinking and strategy. Give us more
            If I ever sold this exact SEO technique, it defiantly wouldn't be cheap ($100's), I'm not saying I'm selling, just that it's not going out to the general public.

            Right now I'm looking at a new keyword (3 words) that I started to target 2 days ago, I'm sitting at position #4 in Google SERPs (no personalized SERPs). I'm also ranking a single thumbnail image for the exact same keyword in Google text search.

            So, I have 2 links on page #1 in Google SERPs for the same keyword, with 20min. worth of work & 2 days after being re-indexed by Google bots.

            I've never had this keyword on my site before 2 days ago, I also wasn't even showing up in the SERPs for this keyword, before 2 days ago.

            I'm going to sit back & wait to see what the traffic at position #4 looks like over the next week, then I'll decide If I want to keep pushing to get position #1.

            I'm working on a way to automate the entire process with php.
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            • Profile picture of the author GlobalTrader
              Originally Posted by yukon View Post

              I'm working on a way to automate the entire process with php.
              I have been a long time subscriber and user of a software product from a guy I have a lot of respect for and he has a software product that can rotate small snippets on up to entire web pages in java, SSI or PHP, not sure if this might help you in your automation process?

              http://www.willmaster.com/software/c...usel/index.php (not an affiliate link)
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              GlobalTrader

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  • Profile picture of the author limestone614
    Links definately still work, but, and this is the important part, I have noticed larger differences dependant on exactly where they are placed, and exactly how they are placed with reference to:

    Location on the page
    Anchor
    Follow / no follow
    Page content

    Same stuff as always really, but the differences between a good link and a bad link are much more noticeable.

    Or they seem that way.

    T
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  • Profile picture of the author andishm
    Great to know that atleast someone was able to recover post penguin update. Congratulations!...
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  • Profile picture of the author computermesh
    I'm a fan of Yukon's strategy. And I now tend to only rank for the long tail keywords and every since I stopped back linking and haven't looked back. I honestly couldn't have been happier. Hopefully you will be able to keep your rankings and don't loose them.
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  • Profile picture of the author Steadyon
    What is the best way to find out which pages the bots are visiting most regularly?
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  • Profile picture of the author darkhorse
    Yukon strategy looks interesting but I could not understand it completely. Can you please shed some more light on it or can PM me as I am also affected from penguin update ?

    Thanks in advance.
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